SEAL Team season 7: David Boreanaz on Jason Hayes’ goodbye
We’ve known for a while that SEAL Team season 7 is going to be the final one at Paramount+, but for David Boreanaz, he may have known longer than anyone. Or, to be more specific, he at least knew that this would be his last season as a part of the ensemble.
Sometimes, you just know when your character’s story has been told, and this series in particular (especially since moving to Paramount+) has been far more serialized than procedural. This is not Bones, where it was easier to justify everyone staying in their jobs for a long time. Jason Hayes is a heroic figure for sure, but it was also always clear that he would only be able to continue forward for so long with his TBI and everything else on his plate.
In a new interview with TV Insider, Boreanaz himself notes that he had decided heading into the seventh season that it would be the final one for him:
His head [entering the season] is almost very familiar to when he was dealing with the inception of what these operators go through. That’s always been a consistent throughline for Jason’s mind and its ultimate balance with his heart and what he thinks is balanced could not be balanced or what he thinks is right is him feeling like he’s the problem and the issues, the arduous task of a character like this is understanding those very fleeting moments of an emotion and then going completely to a different direction with them and how that affects them.
For us, it’s like, alright, the trauma is your first kill. How do you deal with that? So starting the season it was like, okay, this is the perfect way to wrap that cycle up for this character. For me, I knew that that was the right way and I knew going in before the writers’ strike that I was done. I had expressed my interest not to do the show anymore. I was finished regardless of even if they wanted to do two more seasons, one more season, I was done. So then the writers’ strike hit and it became six months later and that had already been decided.
Given that it is important for shows to not overstay their welcome, this does feel like a proper time for closure here — and of course, David is the sort of prolific actor where we could easily see him somewhere else soon enough. Think in terms of everything he’s done over the past few decades!
Related – Be sure to get some more thoughts on the end of SEAL Team via Toni Trucks
What do you think we’re going to see moving into SEAL Team season 7?
How do you imagine the show ending at Paramount+? Be sure to share right now in the attached comments! Once you do just that, remember to keep coming back for some other updates.